Harmy

There are some PCM and DTS isolated music tracks in Wookiegroomer's BD releases, but they are of course the SE.

Wow, I was wondering whether there were any women here. There were a few people I thought were women, but they turned out to be guys (I'm not gonna say who ;-D )...

All three, I want to hopefully encode at better quality and remove more SE changes in all of them. Namely all  the CGI animals (with two possible exceptions) in STAR WARS. In ESB it would only be a few minor things but I want to redo that mainly because of the encode quality because this time I wouldn't be using Ady's AVCHD but his 14GB MKV as a source and maybe adding a bit of my own colour correction. I definitely want to give Mr. Shaw his eyebrows back in ROTJ and try and restore the original ending better. I also want to get rid of some jarring cuts like the Bantha herd in ROTJ. And I will hopefully be able to use some higher quality soundmixes as well.

But it will be quite some time before those will be finished.

Or add some stylish starwarsy bars, instead of the black bars. The question is, as these are static menus, do you need to scale as video or just as picture?

PM sent :-) You should just know, that the latest youtube clips are just experiments for the next version and are not part of the currently available versions. See the first post to get more info about the currently available versions.

Yeah, sure, that's what I meant, that it's better to use this kind of spell check than the automated one.

TV's Frink said:

 

1e) Most (all?) browsers support a spell-check feature.  Use it, especially if it can be automated.

Well, actually, in my experience, an automated spell check can do more damage than good, sometimes you willingly use a word that the spell check doesn't recognise and it changes it into some nonsense. Words like "rotoscoping" can be automatically changed to something like "hygroscopic"  ;-)

OK, to give credit, where credit is due, I have to say that some of it is partially Adywan's work. Let's break it down, shall we?

For this shot I had to remake the wipe and in order to make it fit better with the HD footage and get rid of the horrible DVNR ghosting in GOUT, I used photoshop to recreate the original background as a still picture using the GOUT and the parts from the SE that were the same as the original and then rotoscoping in the speeder and it's shadow in from GOUT.

This shot is the only one for which I had to use just upscaled GOUT, because it was altered beyond recognition in the SE.

This shot was masterfully recreated by Adywan for his ANH: Revisited, but sadly only in SD, so I only used the part where the Ronto walks in front of the camera from Revisited and used this guy in the grey cape as a transition between the SD and HD footage. In this still picture you can see there is a slight difference in the colours but in movement it all happens so quickly that it is pretty seamless.

This shot was the toughest one. I originally thought that I would just use Revisited for it but Ady seems to have used the background from GOUT and rotoscope the stormy in from the SE, but the GOUT shot is pretty bad and he probably had to match the grain on the stormtrooper and also, and that I don't understand, it is cropped even more than the GOUT shot is, so it doesn't look so great in ANH:R and especially when put together with HD footage. First I tried rotoscoping the flying droid out using GOUT but the quality difference was just too noticeable, so I ended up using photoshop to recreate an empty HD background plate which goes to the very edge of the camera movement on both sides and then animating its movement in AE to follow the camera movement in the shot and rotoscoping the stormtrooper into it in detail. When this was done, I exported the whole shot as a sequence of BMP pictures and fixed the little details in Photoshop. It's still not perfect but I think it looks pretty good, especially when put back into the film.

Once again this shot was already done by Adywan in SD but because it was the same transfer, it was quite easy (as in: it only took about two hours) for me  to rotoscope the ANH:R footage into the HD transfer.

This shot was done by rotoscoping the SE HD footage and GOUT together. I used three different masks: one for the Ronto, one for the shadow under the speeder and one for the R2 droid when the speeder passes it. It was really dificult to match the colours of the two different sources and although I used a few different filters on the GOUT, the transition is still quite noticeable. But I think that overall the shot looks better than in the GOUT.

I rotoscoped the Ronto out of this shot using the GOUT. It was quite an undertaking to rotoscope around the foreground characters but as the quality of this shot isn't so bad in the GOUT, the result is IMO quite satisfactory.

The source of the mix used in the NTSC DVD is Belbucus' PCM LD capture, which was the source of h_h's mixes, so it should sync exactly the same as this mix does.

No, I just cut video in PD, for the ro(n)toscoping I use After Effects.

Oh, that's quite alright, now that the project is done (except for the PAL DVD9, which I hope to release this week btw.) this thread is pretty much dead anyway (although I would appreciate some more feedback).

And here's the complete Mos Eisley video with a few newly despecialized shots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agv_jHkkzho&feature=feedu

Thanks :-)

Here's another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXfz3hInhBo

Gaffer Tape said:

...it does seem rather shady to not even redo the menus or anything, but rather let you click the link only for it to say, "You want that feature?  You no can have that feature!"

They obviously do that on purpose as a form of advertisement: Do you want to watch this? Buy the DVD!!!

And I agree that removing close captions is shameful.

It has always been like that here in the Czech Republic, most releases had a retail version and a rental version. And even on VHS, when there was the trilogy set, there was a rental version and you could only rent each film separately. I fully expect these Blu-Rays to be the same for rental- each film separately and without the bonus discs.

PM sent

PM sent.

Those changes are not restorations, that music was never there, it was just written and recorded for those scenes but never put in the films for any version of all the official sound-mixes.

It's interesting, how most of the time you can tell if someone's bad spelling or grammar are caused by him being a non-native speaker or whether it is because he just can't spell or doesn't care. And also, my own spelling abilities aren't so great either, but that's why I use spell-check, (Firefox and Chrome both have it and I'm sure most of the other browsers do too) sure, it won't show stuff like Lucas is a lair (still funny) but it will fix stuff like double letters (one of my biggest problems - speak of the devil, I just typed bigest :-) ) and stuff like that.

I used Ady's mix for my TESB PDE (which should be the same sync as GOUT) and I felt it was in sync but fishosaurus says that he thinks that while it syncs in the beginning, there is a 175 ms delay by the end. Now, this could also be an issue with my PDE video, so it may sync just fine with the GOUT but it's certainly worth paying attention to.

Absolutely! In the mkv you can actually see the grain. ESB:R is gonna look so awesome :-)

OK, version 2, slightly better, I think :-)

I'd upload the sound for you but there was an audio fix released and I only have the unfixed version. But because the audio fix was released, you might be able to download the audio separately somewhere.

Oh, and here's what h_h said about Ady's mix:

I've only listened on my headphones so far, not the full 5.1, but mostly the sound seemed pretty good.  The majority of it is the '97 SE mix, so there are various dialogue differences from the familiar 35mm version (how many of them appeared in the 70mm is anyone's guess).  Some parts of the movie use the 1993 mix, but this was not always done consistently: most--but not all--of the music edits, and a few of the lines, in addition to the obvious places where the edit differs from the SE.  Occasionally the transitions between the sources weren't always seamless and had audible jump cuts, though admittedly this was rare.

What I can't figure out is why adywan decided to use the surround channels from the 2004 mix combined with the front channels from the 1997 version.  I won't fully know what that sounds like until I've had a chance to play it in 5.1, but while usually they are similar, occasionally this results in a bizarre effect when they don't match up.  Most clearly this can be found when Luke observes the probe droid meteor landing on Hoth: the dvd version added a rolling echo that moves from front to back to bolster the impact, but in this mix only the rear half of the sound is heard (in all pre-2004 versions, this was not there at all).

Most of these things come down to individual preference and nitpicking, though.  He has done an incredible job with this, and I'm very grateful to him for making this version.  Here's hoping to see a theatrical version of Star Wars from him sometime in the future.  ;)

Yeah, I was just saying that for competition's sake. Ady's audio is on his TESB Theatrical Reconstruction DVD. I haven't seen TESB with h_h's mix (I have heard SW and Jedi though and they're awesome) so I can't really say which is better but Ady's is like 90% true 5.1, not an upmix like h_h's. This is what Ady said about it:

Adywan said:

The audio has been created using the laserdisc SE 5.1, an upmix from the PCM laserdisc track,surround channels from the 2004 DVD & music soundtrack.

How about Ady's Theatrical Reconstruction 5.1 mix of TESB?

Btw. it's awesome that you'll be doing the MKVs, can't wait!